Sid Meier's Memoir: A Life in Computer Games
wwnorton.com
wwnorton.com
> Meier said Firaxis has adopted a "rule of thirds" for new Civilization entries: "one-third traditional gameplay, one-third is improved from the last version, and one-third is brand new." But the team also has to be careful with everything they add. "We're now at the point where for every new feature we put in we have to take something out, because it's very easy to overwhelm the player with complexity or detail or things like that."
One thing about the book, it's very much "a life in computer games" as the title says, and not a full autobiography. Events outside of the games don't come up much. I think he meets his wife and gets married within the space of a paragraph.
This is the way like my biogrpahies because, let's face it, there's no reason to think there's anything interesting about his personal life.
It's like saying a book is obviously best because it's been handed down for generations, or a song is great because everyone knows it.
There will always be a best selling version of something, and you may not need anything special about it other than a coincidence of luck, skill, and inspiration, of which only luck accelerates the first success so that the subsequent ones have the opportunity to succeed.
In this respect, the ancillary factors are always quite boring because they don't influence the making of great games - they don't slow anything down. Others may have had a sick day at the wrong time or a hopeless addiction to reading the paper in the morning, or mild depression, or a vibrant social life that distracted them, or something equally mundane.
If the book avoids personal details, it's probably because they weren't differential factors, and we'll never know about the second or third best version of him because games (and life) are not a double blind process. Success breeds opportunities.
to you. I gave reasons I find them interesting. You don't have to find them interesting.
The complexity granularity of control resources (down to managing soil quality for fields yield) management appears to be deep in this game, but I cant live long enough to find out yet.
Sid deserves one of the top seats in the Video Game Hall of Fame. Carmack, Sid, Garriott, and (press) F for others.
Video games built my career, and then in my career I helped several of these studios build out so they could build more!
Video games are the fabric of modern computing's woven tapestry history. (A tapestry by the old wire weavers would be amazing)
You need two screens. One for the game, and one for the spreadsheet.
When "Masters of Orion" came out in the early 90s - and advanced... I had gotten the latest version of the time and lost interest quickly - and a friend asked why I didnt like it - and i replied "I don't like playing a spreadsheet"
So there was an article back a few years ago, there was an article about a guy who lived in the mission in SF and he was basically the accountant to a guild on EVE and he did NOT play the game - he made 100K $USD Real IRL money being paid to manage the finances of some huge Eve guild's in game assets....
He said all he does all day is build spread sheets. Wait until someone make the GPT assistant or agents for these games.
Jarvis and "Computer" will be real soon for in game massive fleet management.
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Wait until we connect a game to IRL infra - and you can design an workflow with a factorio-like interface powered by a GPT mortar to managing the actual execution and api connects.
This is coming to a greater extent than it hasn't already. Imagine training all every robotic arm movement ever made in a factory based on the logs, learning from the yield results and being able to fine-tune based on that.
I've managed the installation of medical lab robots/test lines - but only to the Layer 3 to ensure physically placed, powered, connected then hand off for commissioning and testing...
Nothing large scale though.
Factory automation is one of the ones where I wish I would have, if I were to have taken one of the many career tangents that was presented to me in my 20s..,
Some of those guilds are big operations. At one time, a World of Warcraft guild was responsible for OpenSSL maintenance.
It's 4 episodes long (episodes 23-26). It's an overview of Sid's career, and so it's very similar to his autobiography, but I enjoyed listening to Sid talk about it in a different way than I enjoyed reading the book.
He likens it to the opposite of "I picture the statue and removed the bits that didn't look like it". He has no idea, maybe a gut feeling. Playtesting is the only way. He goes in great detail describing a game like civ with dinosaurs that sounds fun on paper, but he was never able to make it fun.
Wonderful insights.
Also Sid debunks the nuclear Gandhi thing once and for all.
For those so inclined, CivRev, the game that was basically "civ on consoles" is an actual Sid Meier and an interesting window into how he would have continued the series (the latest Designer Notes podcast goes into some length on this). CivRev is simpler, faster paced and dispenses with most of the detail of the PC games, but can be fun, even if not deep.
In short, I think it has some great tips if you’re an amateur interested in game design.
I tuned out of sims by the time F19 Stealth Fighter came around.